Set up a marketing funnel that creates repeat business

A marketing funnel nurtures leads, drawing them through the various marketing stages: awareness, engagement, evaluation, commitment, repeat and referral.

It is rare for new leads to purchase your most expensive offering on their first visit - especially online. You don't have the benefit of meeting online leads in person, so your marketing funnel has to do the job of building relationship and trust.

Offer options and variety as people move down the funnel

With the aim being to move people down the funnel one major mistake that many service companies make is to only have one type of service. This often leads to one of two scenarios. Either the service company becomes inundated with work and is unable to fulfill additional orders, or no one is buying the service.

The solution is to offer more layers in your marketing funnel. People may not wish to take a leap of faith and purchase an expensive service from you but they may be interested in ‘testing the water’ with a smaller purchase of some kind.

Therefore offer lower-priced introductory products and services such as an e-course, teleseminar, audio book, or even a cut-down version of your main service.

Create a price structure in line with your funnel

Once people have passed through the first few steps of your marketing funnel, they are engaged, they have evaluated your product and they are ready for a commitment.

It is still important to offer a variety of choices. People are wary about spending money online. What can you offer at a low to mid range price that will not be too risky an investment?

Once you have proved your value and trustworthiness with a low risk investment, people (when ready) will naturally be inclined to purchase one of your more premium products or services.

Be patient, consistent and genuine

Try and avoid making reactive changes to your marketing funnel. Online prospects respond well to consistency of message, tone and delivery. It may take weeks or months for people to move through each stage (depending on your type of business). Don't panic and don't push.

This is why it is important to plan your marketing funnel.

Make space for dialogue in your marketing funnel

It is also wise to set up conversation as part of your online marketing funnel. Give prospects the opportunity to provide feedback, ask questions, evaluate your product. They will feel value and you will learn an enormous amount about what is and isn't working.

Statistics

With over 80% of the companies* lacking a lead nurturing process (a process that moves a response from responder to lead to qualified lead), much of the money is wasted. *Reported by IDC at IDC Decisions conference, 2009.

Deliverables

This service helps you:

    * Identify opportunities to engage visitors
    * Define back-end system from engagement to sale
    * Create promotional graphics for site
    * Write promotional text and new pages (*if required)
    * Upload content to site

Cost

Dependent on requirement.